General Thread
Well, I guess this is fate. I only had just previously stumbled across a world with temperate polar zones before I found this thread. I'm personally not satisfied with the butterflying of the millions of tons of Antartic waters, so to understate your achievement here, I'm going to say that this is a unique and excellent TL ! (Read : You are one crazy stud's arse !! ) Thenk yew. Thenk yew vera much, show's at 8 and 11, bring the kids. While you've already said that your priority here is sensationalism to plausibility, this TL knocks my brain, at the right time even !! I just barely started to think how cultures in a temperate polar zone would look like, and here you present us with the most morbidly eccentric possibility of one, with references from clasicall works themed on morbid western contemporary fantasies of eccentric, isolated alien cultures. It is all fairly justified by not only the extreme-ness of the environtment, but also by its isolation from the rest of the world. I'd like to build plausibility in whenever possible, but I want to take things to the weird and nasty edges of plausibility. Thanks. Coal mining in the stone age is also a rocking idea !! However, to be honest I actually hoped for the Antarticans to be gunpowder-less until by the European arrival, because it will be interesting to see Europeans encountering a civilization that is as advanced as them, but without gunpowder weaponry. I have some plans there, as to how that will develop. I suspect I'm going to get arguments, so I don't want to tip my hand too soon. And I will continue to hope that one day, we can find a way to keep those evaporated ices in, if not earth, at least our universe, that is not teleportation..... Well, some ASBishness about all that ice was somewhat necessary. Basically, we've got a POD that was going to significantly affect worldwide sea levels from 20 million years on, with effects maxing out at about 6 million years. Lots more water in the oceans, and a couple of hundred feet higher water levels suggests major differences in ocean currents, and major differences in rainfall patterns and freshwater distributions on land... Possibly, at periods and in places where hominids were evolving. So if I didn't do something arbitrary with the water, I might not have humans to play with later. Frankly, I was willing to just say 'okay, humans evolve anyway.' But then the obnoxious rules-lawyers descend on me, and that's just tedious. So if I was going to bend the rules for hominids, might as well bend them big time, for human civilisations to evolve in the rest of the world more or less identical to what we got now. Gives us some recognizeable people and players to tangle with. Besides, the part I really want to have fun with is a lovely little period of 135 years, very very late in the game. So basically, I had to whip out the big magic wand. Temperate poles, by the way, may well have been the norm for earth rather than the exception. The current poles may essentially be a pair of twin geologic flukes - an isolated continent at one end, trapping ice and facilitating a freezer circumpolar current, and an essentially landlocked ocean at the other end. - Never said that I want it without ASB, it's just that it would have been better if there is at least an explanation, but we can say it's the ultimate secret boss of this RPG. It's not like we need to defeat it in order to finish the game.... I have my own idea for a story behind the lack of the ice cap, if pretty much pushing it, and that's an understatement. Basically involving a giant comet/meteor near-grazing earth on her Antarctic side with the speed, size and off-earth distance that is arbitrariously making the grazing, strong enough to siphon a gigantic volume water from the area that would IOTL form our Antarctic ice cap(or maybe when it's already an ice cap ), and some heating/heat-entrapping-to-the-polar-zone effects, but weak enough to change earth virtually no more than that. Things are, not only that the idea is frivolous, I can't even begin to look for the right period for it to happen without making virtually any butterflies..... Certainly I have no intention of pushing this idea to you, not even my personal dissatisfaction regarding the disappearance the ice cap without any explanation. This is all but my humble opinion. - We treat the Antarctic ice cap as an inevitable development. But what if it was simply the result of one extremely bad day. Consider, volcanic eruptions occur all the time. Major volcanic eruptions can, however, pour dust and debris into the upper atmosphere sufficient to block sunlight, dim the sun, and create winter conditions in summer. I have no support for this one way or the other, but suppose that Antarctica's ice cap is the ultimate butterfly - the result of one very badly timed Krakatoa level eruption at the south pole. Consider - 20 million years ago, Antarctica is isolated by the sinking of the minicontinents of Kerguelen and Zealandia and the movement away of South America and Australia. Around this time the circumpolar current forms. But it takes roughly fifteen million years for Antarctica to completely glaciate. Likely, after the first five or ten million, its completely glaciated and dead, or close enough. But the time factor suggests that Antarctica did not necessarily die quickly, or perhaps that it didn't die inevitably. Maybe 20 million years ago, Antarctica was a cool place, but not completely inhospitable. The current was drying it out by preventing water clouds from moving inland, and blocking warm currents. But at the same time, during summers at least, the continent was probably a heat sink. It might have endured for a long, long time like this. But supposing you've got a Krakatoa like explosion in late winter, early summer. Result - the long cold winter-summer. This is the warm spell, but it doesn't warm up, instead, blocked sunlight keeps temperatures low, lots of snow and ice falls everywhere, doesn't melt. Keeps accumulating through the summer and then again through the winter. Eventually, the atmosphere clears out, that year or a few years down the road. But now Antarctica is blanketed with a deep coating of shiny reflective deep snow in many areas, reflecting light away. It melts, eventually, a lot of it, but very late, and some of it doesn't melt at all. The glaciers start their creep. The volcanic explosion at precisely the wrong time is a tipping point which turns the continent into an icebox. But there's still the problem of what to do with all the excess water. Maybe stack it really high in greenland? Who lives in Siberia anyway?